A big issue I have with this Unity/Octane marriage is how terrible Octane is at rendering low-poly assets. There are renderers out there with shading termination hacks that make for beautiful low-poly renders. Thea render, Modo, and Furryball come to mind. These renderers are optimized for lower-poly content, and so they don't suffer from terminator artifacts.

I have looked through the manual, and I can't find subdivision surfaces mentioned anywhere. How do I access the subdiv levels for my scene geometry? I think this is really important. I would like to import all-quad FBX assets and have them subdivided at render time. If I have to export these assets at high subdiv levels, that's going explode asset import times and bog-down Unity.

It looks like I've asked this same question before, and xhed responded. And now I've created another. Apologies for that. I will add an octane shader to my mesh and see if that gets me access to subdivision settings. I'll report back. Thanks, xhed, for your answer in the other thread.

Xhed wrote:Octane does not support the creation of subdivisions, you'll need to provide it with a more detailed mesh.

But Octane Standalone does allow me to click the little wrench icon and set the subdiv level. Also, don't the other DCC plugins handle this pretty seamlessly too? So this is just a Unity thing?

The problem with just importing assets at high subdiv levels is that Unity is not well optimized for this. Just updating the editor to the newest version can trigger a re-import on your project, and if you are using lots of dense meshes, that's going to be a long, painful process when that happens.

The above asset can be used to subdivide the meshes in your shot near the camera that might be causing shading issues. But even with 2 subdiv levels you still might have the dreaded terminator issues.

So the 2nd thing you'll need to do is increase the Ray epsilon in the PBR render target.

Using both these things together, you should be able to get production quality renders out of Octane Unity (for static assets at least).

My thoughts are that if this free asset can do what I asking, I think it's reasonable for Octane for Unity to be able to do this at render time. If meshes in the scene had an exposed property for subdiv level, that would be fantastic.

Also, .002 or .003 might be a better starting default for ray epsilon.

I've discussed the issue with our Octane devs, and they've given me a few pointers on how to tell Octane to create subdivisions. The big issue will be in adding elements in Unity to control the subdivisions for your mesh. As subdivisions are done on a mesh (not on an instance), and the scene hierarchy consists of instanced meshes, I'll need to figure out a way to hook up the controls to Unity.